1917 was named as Best Picture of 2019 by the Dallas-Fort Worth Film Critics Association.
Photo by François Duhamel/Universal Pictures
The Dallas-Fort Worth Film Critics Association, of which our own Alex Bentley is a member, has voted the war epic 1917 as the best film of 2019.
The results of the DFWFCA's 26th annual critics’ poll were released on December 16, with both 1917 and Marriage Story winning four awards. In addition to Best Picture, 1917 won for Best Director (Sam Mendes), Best Cinematography (Roger Deakins), and Best Musical Score (Thomas Newman). The film is scheduled for release in Dallas on Christmas Day, with a wide release on January 10.
Marriage Story, the runner-up for Best Picture, nearly swept the acting categories, winning for Best Actor (Adam Driver), Best Actress (Scarlett Johansson), and Best Supporting Actress (Laura Dern). Writer/director Noah Baumbach also won for Best Screenplay.
The other acting award went to Brad Pitt for Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood, the only award for writer/director Quentin Tarantino's ninth, and supposedly next-to-last, film.
Other winners included Apollo 11 for Best Documentary and Toy Story 4 for Best Animated Film. The Lighthouse was awarded the Russell Smith Award, named for the late Dallas Morning News film critic, for the best low-budget or cutting-edge independent film.
The Dallas-Fort Worth Film Critics Association consists of 32 broadcast, print, and online journalists from throughout the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
The story of Dr. Frankenstein and his monster is now over 200 years old, with Mary Shelley’s book having been adapted or referenced in close to 500 films. Less common is the character of The Bride of Frankenstein, which existed in the original text but has more often than not been excised in adaptations. Writer/director Maggie Gyllenhaal has tried to rectify that by giving the character a big showcase in her new film, The Bride!.
Gyllenhaal has reimagined the story as one in which a woman named Ida (Jessie Buckley) becomes possessed by the spirit of Shelley (also Buckley). At the same time, the already-existing Frankenstein’s monster (Christian Bale) approaches Dr. Euphronius (Annette Bening), who specializes in reanimation, with the request to make him a wife. When Ida falls to her death in an “accident” involving her boyfriend (John Magaro), the ideal corpse becomes available.
After Ida’s resurrection, she and the monster become restless being studied by Dr. Euphronius and decide to break out to experience the world. The world, naturally, is not exactly welcoming to them, and soon the couple are on the run for causing mayhem, including a few murders. In hot pursuit are detective Jake Wiles (Peter Sarsgaard) and his assistant, Myrna Mallow (Penélope Cruz), as well as other authorities.
It’s clear that Gyllenhaal wanted to merge the Frankenstein story with Bonnie & Clyde, especially since she sets the film in the mid-1930s. And that wouldn’t have been a bad idea if having the monster and The Bride going on a crime spree was truly the focus of the movie. But most of the time there’s less intentionality in their misdeeds and more confusion, leading to a muddled plot with no clear direction or end goal in mind.
One of the biggest problems is that Gyllenhaal starts the energy of the film at an 11, giving her and everyone else nowhere to go but down. She dabbles in multiple different tones, at times going the straight drama route and other times making what seems like full-on camp. At one point, she even has the monster and the Bride in a dance sequence set to “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” which would be hilarious as an homage to Young Frankenstein if the film weren’t so disjointed.
Most baffling of all is what Gyllenhaal wants from The Bride character. She morphs multiple times over the course of the film, from close to unintelligible at the beginning to rough-and-tumble at the end. There are hints at the lack of control she has over her autonomy, including Shelley’s possession of her and the monster lying to her about her past, but any commentary that Gyllenhaal might be trying to make gets lost amid the oddity of the film as a whole.
Both Buckley and Bale are all-in for their performances, which definitely fall in the “love it or hate it” dichotomy. Each scene is pitched so high that there’s little nuance to either of them, and neither is on par with their previous Oscar-caliber roles. The high-powered supporting cast of Bening, Sarsgaard, Cruz, and Jake Gyllenhaal is watchable based on previous roles, but none of them elevate this particular movie.
Whatever intentions Maggie Gyllenhaal had in making The Bride! are only halfway legible in a film that can never find its tonal footing. There has rarely been subtlety in movies featuring Frankenstein’s monster and related characters, but this one makes all the others seem like stuffy dramas in comparison.
